He was tired of watching Jim round his back during a deadlift. He had tried every cue in the book to fix the problem.

But Pat Barber found his client was stubborn and always seemed to oppose his coach’s requests. This time, Barber—a long-time member of CrossFit Inc.’s Seminar Staff—tried a different approach: He facetiously told his client to perform a deadlift incorrectly, and it actually improved the movement. In that moment, a seemingly incorrect cue—“round your back”—was the right one to achieve the goal, Barber explained.

Barber said being able to adapt your coaching commands to help a client move better is what sets good coaches apart from great ones. Echoing the Level 2 material, Barber said coaches should be less concerned about finding the most theoretically perfect coaching cue and more focused on discovering a way to help their athletes learn skills and move efficiently.

“The best cue is the one that works,” Barber explained. “It doesn’t matter if you read it in a book or made it up on the spot.”

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.